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Wellbeing | Good nurses are attuned to the lived experience of patients. Can the theory of phenomenology add more to their practice? | One of phenomenology’s central claims is that we need to factor in the role played by embodied, perceiving, thinking and feeling agents if we want to understand the world we live in. This approach has had a profound influence on many areas of philosophy, and phenomenologists have offered incisive analyses of topics suc... | Dan Zahavi | https://aeon.co//essays/how-can-phenomenology-help-nurses-care-for-their-patients | |
Education | If we took Aristotle seriously we would revolutionise our educational systems to enable citizens to learn throughout life | Let me begin with an image. It is of an old-fashioned beam balance of the sort that blind Justice is often portrayed as holding. Its very appearance tells us what it is to be accurate. What I want you to imagine is that part of your visual system is like such a balance. When you discriminate colours correctly, it tilts... | C D C Reeve | https://aeon.co//essays/for-aristotle-education-is-what-equips-us-for-a-better-life | |
Animals and humans | Modern zoos are proud of their contribution to animal conservation but will always be haunted by their histories | In the archives of the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York, there is an old postcard from the city aquarium of a large sea turtle with four boys straddling its back. The turtle lies flattened upon a pathway in front of a fence. At the feet of the children, near the animal’s front left flipper, is a messy coil of ... | Nigel T Rothfels | https://aeon.co//essays/have-modern-zoos-really-put-their-history-behind-them | |
Race and ethnicity | When Europeans colonised North Africa, they imposed their preoccupation with race onto its diverse peoples and deep past | Three centuries after Christopher Columbus landed in the Americas, Europeans had sailed to the farthest reaches of the Earth, trading in markets as far away as the Americas, Africa and Asia. North Africa, just across the Mediterranean from Europe, was terra cognita. Not only had Europeans fought many wars with North Af... | Ramzi Rouighi | https://aeon.co//essays/how-the-west-made-arabs-and-berbers-into-races | |
Consciousness and altered states | Psychedelics offer a sense of expansive connectedness, just like astronauts have felt looking back to Earth from space | In 1966, on a rooftop overlooking San Francisco, the writer Stewart Brand felt that he could perceive the curvature of the Earth, an effect of the psychedelic substance he had consumed. He wondered why no one had photographed the Earth from space yet, and realised how much this might help people feel connected to each ... | Rosalind Watts, Sam Gandy & Alex Evans | https://aeon.co//essays/psychedelics-can-have-the-same-overview-effect-as-a-space-journey | |
Mathematics | A single statistic, or its misuse, can help upend a nation. Civic life depends on a basic level of statistical literacy | It might have come to your attention that the United Kingdom is experiencing some difficulties over an issue called Brexit. The referendum on whether the UK should leave the European Union was held in June 2016, and the Leave campaign produced an iconic image of a big red bus plastered with the message: ‘We send the EU... | David Spiegelhalter | https://aeon.co//essays/good-citizenship-depends-on-basic-statistical-literacy | |
Neurodiversity | The movement has good intentions, but it favours the high-functioning and overlooks those who struggle with severe autism | I couldn’t help feeling a little apprehensive before my meeting with Thomas Clements. The British 30-year-old has what used to be called Asperger’s Syndrome, and describes himself as ‘slightly autistic’. Until our meeting in London, I’d had few close encounters with autistic people, so I wondered how to act, and how he... | Moheb Costandi | https://aeon.co//essays/why-the-neurodiversity-movement-has-become-harmful | |
Quantum theory | Hugh Everett blew up quantum mechanics with his Many-Worlds theory in the 1950s. Physics is only just catching up | One of the most radical and important ideas in the history of physics came from an unknown graduate student who wrote only one paper, got into arguments with physicists across the Atlantic as well as his own advisor, and left academia after graduating without even applying for a job as a professor. Hugh Everett’s story... | Sean Carroll | https://aeon.co//essays/how-the-many-worlds-theory-of-hugh-everett-split-the-universe | |
Animals and humans | The Classical world abounded with avians – and so birds took up in the human imagination, nesting in our language and art | Sometimes you need to look at things from outside to see them more clearly. That’s the rationale presumably for psychotherapy, marriage guidance counselling and management consultancy. But the best example on a global scale was the spectacular ‘Earthrise’ photograph from the Apollo 8 mission of 1968, which for the firs... | Jeremy Mynott | https://aeon.co//essays/the-ancient-world-teemed-with-birds-now-we-think-with-them | |
Teaching and learning | Immanuel Kant held that moral education is hydraulic: shame squashes down our vices, making space for virtue to rise up | Has the behaviour of another person ever made you feel ashamed? Not because they set out to shame you but because they acted so virtuously that it made you feel inadequate by comparison. If so, then it is likely that, at least for a brief moment in time, you felt motivated to improve as a person. Perhaps you found your... | Louise Chapman | https://aeon.co//essays/on-immanuel-kants-hydraulic-model-of-moral-education | |
Virtues and vices | The temptation to be uncivil grows as public discourse gets nastier and more aggressive. Can rudeness ever be righteous? | Public discourse is in an accelerating downward spiral of coarse insult, free-flying contempt and general meanness. We will surely soon reach bottom, an inevitably inarticulate resting place where we quit wasting words and just mutely flip each other off. Since bemoaning our uncivil culture is almost as prevalent as in... | Amy Olberding | https://aeon.co//essays/whats-the-difference-between-being-righteous-and-being-rude | |
Gender | Nothing we can do will make the world more free, fair and prosperous than giving women control over their own bodies | Women’s bodies are one of the biggest political battlegrounds of our time. What should in many ways be personal – a woman’s body – is instead political. The assault ranges from the recent clampdown on family planning in the United States (and its global gag rule prohibiting funding for international family-planning org... | Victoria Bateman | https://aeon.co//essays/the-real-sexism-problem-in-the-discipline-of-economics | |
Philosophy of language | Words stand for things in the world, and they stand apart from it. Perhaps meaning is more sunken into words than we realise? | In the film The Big Sleep (1946), the private eye Philip Marlowe (played by Humphrey Bogart) calls at the house of General Sternwood to discuss his two daughters. They sit in the greenhouse as the wealthy widower recounts an episode of blackmail involving his younger daughter. At one point, Marlowe interjects with an i... | Alexander Stern | https://aeon.co//essays/why-meaning-is-more-sunken-into-words-than-we-realise | |
Technology and the self | Don’t just give away your privacy to the likes of Google and Facebook – protect it, or you disempower us all | Imagine having a master key for your life. A key or password that gives access to the front door to your home, your bedroom, your diary, your computer, your phone, your car, your safe deposit, your health records. Would you go around making copies of that key and giving them out to strangers? Probably not the wisest id... | Carissa Véliz | https://aeon.co//essays/privacy-matters-because-it-empowers-us-all | |
Human evolution | Universal emotions are the deep engine of human consciousness and the basis of our profound affinity with other animals | Charles Darwin closed his On the Origin of Species (1859) with a provocative promise that ‘light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history’. In his later books The Descent of Man (1871) and The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), Darwin shed some of that promised light, especially on the evolved... | Stephen T Asma & Rami Gabriel | https://aeon.co//essays/human-culture-and-cognition-evolved-through-the-emotions | |
History of science | Two centuries before Einstein, Hume recognised that universal time, independent of an observer’s viewpoint, doesn’t exist | In 1915, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to the philosopher and physicist Moritz Schlick, who had recently composed an article on the theory of relativity. Einstein praised it: ‘From the philosophical perspective, nothing nearly as clear seems to have been written on the topic.’ Then he went on to express his intellectu... | Matias Slavov | https://aeon.co//essays/what-albert-einstein-owes-to-david-humes-notion-of-time | |
Stories and literature | Why the ancient erotic poems of Sappho and Wallada bint al-Mustakfi are far more stimulating than modern pornography | A woman rests in a field surrounded by apple trees. Savouring the sounds and smells of the shaded grove, she muses on the ‘sacred recess’ of her idyllic surroundings, and surrenders herself to fantasy. The wind is ‘honey sweet’, the air perfumed with ‘musk roses’. She is waiting for a lover. ‘Come to me from Crete,’ ou... | Jamie Mackay | https://aeon.co//essays/how-ancient-poetry-can-revitalise-our-erotic-imaginations | |
Gender and identity | From tutus to trucks, parents are often struck by the gendered choices made by their children. Could these be ‘hardwired’? | If anything characterises the 21st-century social signalling of sex differences, it is the increased emphasis on ‘pink for girls and blue for boys’, with female ‘pinkification’ probably carrying the most strident message. Clothes, toys, birthday cards, wrapping paper, party invitations, computers, phones, bedrooms, bic... | Gina Rippon | https://aeon.co//essays/is-pink-for-girls-and-blue-for-boys-biology-or-conditioning | |
Thinkers and theories | Charles Sanders Peirce was a brilliant philosopher, mathematician and scientist. His polymathic work should be better known | [I intend] to make a philosophy like that of Aristotle, that is to say, to outline a theory so comprehensive that, for a long time to come, the entire work of human reason, in philosophy of every school and kind, in mathematics, in psychology, in physical science, in history, in sociology and in whatever other departme... | Daniel Everett | https://aeon.co//essays/charles-sanders-peirce-was-americas-greatest-thinker | |
Neuroscience | DBS is an incredibly promising intervention for intractable neurological and psychiatric illness. What are the risks? | In 1963, a neurophysiologist named José Delgado demonstrated the effects of invasive electronic brain stimulation. He implanted electrodes into the brain of a highly aggressive bull, and then joined the animal in a bullring, armed with a hand-held radio transmitter to remotely activate the electrodes. When the bull beg... | Jonathan Pugh | https://aeon.co//essays/is-deep-brain-stimulation-for-better-health-worth-the-risk | |
Information and communication | The first newspapers contained not high-minded journalism but hundreds of readers’ letters exchanging news with one another | The new medium would spread half-truths, propaganda and lies. It would encourage self-absorption and solipsism, thereby fragmenting communities. It would allow any amateur to become an author and degrade public discourse. Sound familiar? Such were the anxieties that the invention of printing unleashed on the world as 1... | Rachael Scarborough King | https://aeon.co//essays/how-personal-letters-built-the-possibility-of-a-modern-public | |
Social psychology | Secular modernity requires the weeding out of all the baloney. Yet it’s not clear that we are any less credulous than before | ‘Bunk’ means baloney, hooey, bullshit. Bunk isn’t just a lie, it’s a manipulative lie, the sort of thing a con man might try to get you to believe in order to gain control of your mind and your bank account. Bunk, then, is the tool of social parasites, and the word ‘debunk’ carries with it the expectation of clearing o... | Emily Ogden | https://aeon.co//essays/is-debunking-more-about-the-truth-teller-than-the-truth | |
Economic history | Market booms and busts might be irrational, but we can understand why they happen – and what to do to mitigate the damage | Last year, Ross Gerber, a corporate investment manager, Tweeted a warning about Tesla. Gerber wanted investors to know that Tesla’s success would put other industries ‘at risk’. Which ones? Just oil, internal combustion engine automobiles, car dealers, railroads, auto parts, automobile services, and gas stations. ‘Did ... | Brent Goldfarb & David A Kirsch | https://aeon.co//essays/economic-bubbles-are-irrational-but-we-can-understand-them | |
The future | Only since the Enlightenment have we been able to imagine humans going extinct. Is it a sign of our maturity as a species? | In 1844, the Russian prince Vladimir Odoevsky wrote a short story in which a future humanity, stricken with overpopulation and resource-depletion, welcomes a ‘Last Messiah’ who instructs a jaded mankind to commit omnicide by blowing up the planet. Earlier, in 1836, the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi proclaimed that, if ... | Thomas Moynihan | https://aeon.co//essays/to-imagine-our-own-extinction-is-to-be-able-to-answer-for-it | |
Personality | Psychopaths have a reputation for cunning and ruthlessness. But they are more like you and me than we care to admit | Psychopath. The word conjures up the image of a cold-blooded killer, or perhaps a fiendishly clever but heartless egoist. There’s Ted Bundy, who in the 1970s abducted women, killed them, and had sex with their decomposing bodies. Or Hannibal Lecter from the film The Silence of the Lambs (1991), who cunningly escaped hi... | Heidi Maibom | https://aeon.co//essays/you-have-more-in-common-with-a-psychopath-than-you-realise | |
Biography and memoir | A campaigning journalist and an early feminist, Harriet Martineau humanised economic theory through Dickensian storytelling | In 1855, Harriet Martineau, aged 52, prepared to die of a heart condition diagnosed by her London physician. She hastily finished her autobiography and wrote her own obituary for The Daily News, the newspaper she had served since 1852, leaving a space for someone to enter the date of death when it finally occurred. Tha... | Valerie R Sanders | https://aeon.co//essays/the-little-deaf-woman-who-became-a-victorian-pop-economist | |
Food and drink | Humans have evolved with little resistance to abundant, easy food. Will we gorge ourselves and our planet to death? | Ten thousand desert rats, 10,000 fish, 14,000 sheep, 1,000 lambs, 1,000 fat oxen and many more creatures slaughtered, cooked and served: that is how Ashurnishabal of Mesopotamia (883-859 BCE) pampered almost 70,000 guests for 10 days. The Archbishop of York’s enthronement feast in 1466 CE required 104 oxen, 2,000 geese... | Louise Fabiani | https://aeon.co//essays/are-we-eating-ourselves-and-our-planet-to-extinction | |
Evolution | Human life is fragile but tardigrades and other extremophiles show that life itself is in little danger of disappearing | Life – each life – is special. Living things differ from the nonliving in many ways, such as metabolism, responsiveness to stimuli, and the capacity to reproduce. Living things also maintain internal conditions that are highly nonrandom and low in entropy. Unlike, say, crystals or salt solutions, life as we know it can... | David P Barash | https://aeon.co//essays/extremophiles-and-life-in-the-most-unlikely-of-places | |
Cities | High in the Andes, Potosí supplied the world with silver, and in return reaped goods and peoples from Burma to Baghdad | In 1678, a Chaldean priest from Baghdad reached the Imperial Villa of Potosí, the world’s richest silver-mining camp and at the time the world’s highest city at more than 4,000 metres (13,100 feet) above sea level. A regional capital in the heart of the Bolivian Andes, Potosí remains – more than three and a half centur... | Kris Lane | https://aeon.co//essays/potosi-the-mountain-of-silver-that-was-the-first-global-city | |
Physics | In our Universe, time seems to go from past to future, not in reverse. But what if time doesn’t even have a direction? | Ronnie O’Sullivan is an absurdly talented snooker player. When it suits him, the English five-times world champion can switch from playing right-handed to left-handed, and has even hit competition shots one-handed. But can he play snooker backwards in time? Of course he can’t. Why not? Well, there’s nothing particularl... | Matt Farr | https://aeon.co//essays/the-c-theory-of-time-asks-if-time-really-has-a-direction | |
Philosophy of mind | Mindfulness promotes itself as value-neutral but it is loaded with (troubling) assumptions about the self and the cosmos | Three years ago, when I was studying for a Masters in Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, mindfulness was very much in the air. The Department of Psychiatry had launched a large-scale study on the effects of mindfulness in collaboration with the university’s counselling service. Everyone I knew seemed to be invo... | Sahanika Ratnayake | https://aeon.co//essays/mindfulness-is-loaded-with-troubling-metaphysical-assumptions | |
Music | The music of Bach is full of suggestive structures of counterpoint and recursion (even if Hofstadter got it quite wrong) | Achilles: Frankly, I’m a little confused by the title. After all, what do Copper, Silver, and Gold have to do with each other? … Now if the title were, say, Giraffes, Silver, Gold, or Copper, Elephants, Gold, why, I could see it…Tortoise: Perhaps you would prefer Copper, Silver, Baboons?Achilles: Oh, absolutely! But th... | Ilari Kaila | https://aeon.co//essays/what-the-music-of-bach-can-teach-us-about-consciousness | |
Family life | We’re opportunistic, inventive and flexible animals, and there is no ‘natural’ or ‘right’ way to bring up our children | Motherhood has never felt natural to me. I wasn’t very good at understanding my babies’ needs or what their cries meant, something that other parents seemed to know without giving it too much thought. ‘She’s just tired,’ they would say. Or: ‘This sound means he’s hungry.’ And I had no idea, and felt like a failure. Eve... | Olga Mecking | https://aeon.co//essays/there-really-is-no-natural-or-right-way-to-be-a-parent | |
Ethics | Would you carve a roast with a knife that had been used in a murder? Why not? And what does this tell us about ethics? | When I first heard the allegations of serial sexual misconduct against the American folk-rock singer Ryan Adams earlier this year – that he had emotionally and psychologically abused several women and underage girls, using his status in the music industry as leverage – I didn’t want to believe it. Yet this desire to no... | Paul Sagar | https://aeon.co//essays/why-do-we-allow-objects-to-become-tainted-by-chance-links | |
Neuroscience | For centuries, people have navigated the globe using instruments. But what if the Earth itself can help us feel our way? | Navigating to unfamiliar destinations is often a matter of consulting a digital map of the planetary surface. Once accessed, it literally tells us every turn we need to take to get to our destination. ‘You have arrived.’ Thanks, Google. However, without any map – digital or paper – navigation is often an unsettling, ti... | Phil Jaekl | https://aeon.co//essays/can-humans-navigate-by-sensing-the-earths-magnetic-field | |
Thinkers and theories | Life is suffering, whether you sit under a Bodhi Tree or stand with the workers. But do the two schools agree on the remedy? | Marxism and Buddhism might not seem to have much in common. The former is a materialist socioeconomic theory conceived by a 19th-century bearded guy from Trier in Germany, while the latter is a religion originating from orations delivered under a fig tree by a gaunt, peaceful, intimidating character in what is India to... | Adrian Kreutz | https://aeon.co//essays/how-marxism-and-buddhism-complement-each-other | |
Film and visual culture | As aspirational avatars, idolised icons and vessels of collective memory, celebrities permeate all aspects of modern life | In his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Oscar Wilde teased: ‘[T]here is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.’ When he wrote those words, Wilde was at the pinnacle of his fame – and the beginning of a romantic scandal that would make him infamous. Frequen... | Holly Grout | https://aeon.co//essays/the-history-of-celebrity-is-a-history-of-the-concept-of-self | |
Thinkers and theories | Learning from his family, his animals and his work with tribal people, Gregory Bateson saw the creative potential of paradox | There are times when a dilemma that seems like agony in adolescence can not only provide the basis for a prestigious career, but also lead to a profound shift in the world of ideas. Thus it is that the predicament faced by the 17-year-old Gregory Bateson, following his brother’s suicide in 1922, turns out to be extreme... | Tim Parks | https://aeon.co//essays/gregory-bateson-changed-the-way-we-think-about-changing-ourselves | |
Medicine | The backlash against antidepressants results from a suspicion of medicine, and misunderstands the very nature of depression | I was first prescribed antidepressants in 2000. Ever since, I have been on and off these drugs, mostly because the idea of taking them made me uncomfortable. It was a mixture of guilt, probably not unlike the guilt some athletes must feel for taking a prohibited doping substance; shame for needing a pill that had such ... | Vasco M Barreto | https://aeon.co//essays/why-the-constant-trashing-of-antidepressants-is-absurd | |
Religion | Master Nissho Inoue and his band of assassins teach some uncomfortable truths about terrorism, for those who will hear | On an early winter’s morning in 1945, four months after the end of the Second World War, a shabbily dressed man in his late 50s walked into the General Headquarters (GHQ) of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers in Tokyo. His name was Nissho Inoue, a convicted domestic terrorist and lay disciple of one of Japan’s... | Brian Victoria | https://aeon.co//essays/the-lessons-of-nissho-inoue-and-his-cell-of-zen-terrorists | |
Mathematics | Despite the vagaries of free will and circumstance, human behaviour in bulk is far more predictable than we like to imagine | In Isaac Asimov’s novel Foundation (1951), the mathematician Hari Seldon forecasts the collapse of the Galactic Empire using psychohistory: a calculus of the patterns that occur in the reaction of the mass of humanity to social and economic events. Initially put on trial for treason, on the grounds that his prediction ... | Ian Stewart | https://aeon.co//essays/our-behaviour-in-bulk-is-more-predictable-than-we-like-to-imagine | |
Anthropology | On Nias island, the heart can be ‘squeezed’, ‘hot’, even ‘hairy’. What can anthropology say about unfamiliar emotional zones? | In his classic thought experiment set out in ‘What Is An Emotion?’ (1884), William James, pioneer psychologist and brother of the novelist Henry, tried to imagine what would be left of emotion if you subtracted the bodily symptoms. What, for example, would grief be ‘without its tears, its suffocation of the heart, its ... | Andrew Beatty | https://aeon.co//essays/what-does-anthropology-say-about-the-emotional-lives-of-others | |
Neuroscience | Our brains predict the outcomes of our actions, shaping reality into what we expect. That’s why we see what we believe | The Book of Days (1864) by the Scottish author Robert Chambers reports a curious legal case: in 1457 in the town of Lavegny, a sow and her piglets were charged and tried for the murder of a partially eaten small child. After much deliberation, the court condemned the sow to death for her part in the act, but acquitted ... | Daniel Yon | https://aeon.co//essays/how-our-brain-sculpts-experience-in-line-with-our-expectations | |
Thinkers and theories | Well before Bentham, Cesare Beccaria radically questioned the right of the state to imprison and execute its citizens | On 12 April 1764, the citizens of Milan witnessed the brutal killing of Bartolomeo Luisetti. He had been condemned to death after being accused of sodomy. Luisetti was killed by asphyxiation and then burnt at the stake in front of the crowd. Throughout Europe, ruling elites believed that criminal justice had to be done... | Lorenzo Zucca | https://aeon.co//essays/cesare-beccarias-radical-ideas-on-crime-and-punishment | |
History of science | How did the sailors of early modern Europe learn to traverse the world’s seas? By going to school and doing maths problems | In 1673, in a North Sea skirmish that killed nearly 150 men, the French privateer Jean-François Doublet took a bullet that tossed him from the forecastle and broke his arm in two places. How did the precocious young second lieutenant choose to spend his convalescence? Doublet repaired to the French port city of Dieppe,... | Margaret Schotte | https://aeon.co//essays/how-european-sailors-learned-celestial-navigation | |
Stories and literature | In our image-saturated, over-sped world, we are losing the imaginative power to create and find meaning through metaphor | This April, Forbes magazine published the article ‘The Writer Who Couldn’t Answer Standardized Test Questions About Her Own Work (Again)!’ It focused on the American poet Sara Holbrook, who had written for the Huffington Post about just this dilemma – her evident inexpertise about her own poetry – and who was thrust in... | Heather Altfeld & Rebecca Diggs | https://aeon.co//essays/metaphors-grow-the-mind-and-feed-the-soul-dont-lose-them | |
Love and friendship | Hold out for the perfect partner or settle for good enough? In the calculus of love, flourishing means getting it right | ‘I want a man who’s kind and understanding. Is that too much to ask of a millionaire?’ Zsa Zsa Gabor, actress and socialite (1917-2016)The search for ‘the one and only’ romantic partner, our second half who will love us forever and a day, and will light an eternal fire in our loving heart, has been a frustrating undert... | Aaron Ben-Ze’ev | https://aeon.co//essays/to-swipe-to-dream-or-to-settle-how-to-find-your-one-true-love | |
Global history | From Marxism to hip hop, China’s appropriations from the West show that globalisation makes the world bumpy, not flat | The dominant image of China in the West is of a closed, dark place; a country where what reigns supreme is an authoritarianism based on an ancient imperial past that today’s leaders claim to have renounced, while simultaneously extolling China’s 5,000-year history. It’s not a wholly false perception, but the notion of ... | Amy Hawkins & Jeffrey Wasserstrom | https://aeon.co//essays/how-china-remakes-its-cultural-imports-from-the-west | |
History of ideas | The move away from myth and toward reason is an ancient human impulse. But must enchantment be the enemy of enlightenment? | Enlightenment’s programme was the disenchantment of the world… The disenchantment of the world means the extirpation of animism… the Enlightenment detected a fear of the demons through whose effigies human beings had tried to influence nature in magic rituals.Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenmen... | Jason Josephson Storm | https://aeon.co//essays/enlightenment-does-not-demand-disenchantment-with-the-world | |
Biology | A cat is alive, a sofa is not: that much we know. But a sofa is also part of life. Information theory tells us why | On a sofa in the corner of the room, a cat is purring. It seems obvious that the cat is an example of life, whereas the sofa itself is not. But should we trust our intuition? Consider this: Isaac Newton assumed a universal time flowing without external influence, and relative time measured by clocks – just as our perce... | Michael Lachmann & Sara Walker | https://aeon.co//essays/what-can-schrodingers-cat-say-about-3d-printers-on-mars | |
Cosmology | Are you here now? Impossible to say. The idea that any group of events can truly happen at once is just an illusion | One afternoon some years ago, I was walking through the snow thinking about other universes. More specifically, I was turning over in my mind the fact that the hospitality provided by our universe depends on many extremely special things. For example, if the electric repulsion between protons in the nuclei of atoms wer... | Anthony Aguirre | https://aeon.co//essays/is-that-leaf-falling-here-and-now-cosmic-koans-on-time | |
Pleasure and pain | That drink, that cigarette, that dance: wanting things is highly contagious. Can you be immunised against the infection? | Most of what we know, we know from someone else. I believe that Moroni is the capital of the Comoros Islands in the Indian Ocean because a friend of mine just told me this five minutes ago, and I have no reason to think that she is trying to trick me. But she hasn’t been there either – she also knows this only because ... | Bence Nanay | https://aeon.co//essays/can-you-stop-yourself-being-infected-with-other-peoples-desires | |
Thinkers and theories | Kure Tomofusa’s hatred of democracy, human rights and liberalism has found an echo in the West. But has he been joking all along? | Neoreaction, or NRx, is a loose group of techno-fetishising bloggers, represented by the computer engineer Mencius Moldbug and the renegade philosopher Nick Land, working to subvert the liberal world order. Moldbug (the nom de plume of Curtis Yarvin) is best-known for his now-inactive blog Unqualified Reservations. His... | Jeremy Woolsey | https://aeon.co//essays/echoes-of-kure-tomofusas-thought-in-the-nrx-movement | |
Neuroscience | The science of how we sense ourselves from within, including our bodily states, is creating a radical picture of selfhood | In 1926, Virginia Woolf wrote about how, when one is ill: All day, all night the body intervenes; blunts or sharpens, colours or discolours, turns to wax in the warmth of June, hardens to tallow in the murk of February. The creature within can only gaze through the pane – smudged or rosy; it cannot separate off from th... | Noga Arikha | https://aeon.co//essays/the-interoceptive-turn-is-maturing-as-a-rich-science-of-selfhood | |
Thinkers and theories | Hegel’s search for the universal patterns of history revealed a paradox: freedom is coming into being, but is never guaranteed | History, or at least the study of it, is in bad shape these days. Almost everyone agrees that knowing history is important, but in the United States, except at the most elite schools, the study of history is in freefall. Our age seems to share the skepticism voiced by the German philosopher G W F Hegel (1770-1831) when... | Terry Pinkard | https://aeon.co//essays/what-is-history-nobody-gave-a-deeper-answer-than-hegel | |
Film and visual culture | In a strangely unremarked-upon twist, Disney films have taken to subverting romance and rethinking the happy-ever-afters | Love, in the world of Walt Disney films, has changed. Between Tangled (2010) and Moana (2016), the ideal of heterosexual romance has been dethroned by a new ideal: family love. The happy ending of our most-watched childhood stories is no longer a kiss. Today, Disney films end with two siblings reconciled despite their ... | Sophus Helle | https://aeon.co//essays/how-disney-took-to-subverting-its-own-romantic-ideals | |
Nations and empires | As loan sharks, drug smugglers, generals and plant hunters, Scots played a central role in expanding the British Empire | The history of the British empire in Asia cannot be told without the Scots. As loan sharks, drug smugglers, diplomats, generals and plant hunters, they played key roles in expanding Britain’s imperial reach. They kept the empire caffeinated via extortionate loans and opium; they smuggled the lucrative and much-coveted ... | Jessica Hanser | https://aeon.co//essays/from-tea-to-opium-how-the-scots-left-their-mark-on-china | |
Animals and humans | We treat pet dogs with such sentimentality while their wild, endangered relatives are feared and persecuted. Why? | It sounds like a jet – but it can’t be. I look up into the jungle canopy at Khao Yai National Park in Thailand and spot the wings that made the roar: they belong to a wreathed hornbill, a bird with a helmet-like beak half the size of its body, and whose feathers, in flight, can be heard for half a mile. In this park no... | Sy Montgomery | https://aeon.co//essays/how-can-we-treat-pet-dogs-with-love-while-persecuting-their-wild-cousins | |
Beauty and aesthetics | Beauty is a deeply moral matter that makes kindness, empathy and honesty attractive, while vice warps into ugliness | Have you ever thought that someone is far from attractive – perhaps even ugly – only to later come to find that person beautiful? She or he might now even be your partner, spouse or dear friend. And if so, you probably still consider them beautiful. Also, for better or worse, chances are that many others do not. Hold t... | Panos Paris | https://aeon.co//essays/how-virtue-morphs-into-beauty-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder | |
Astronomy | The Universe’s biggest galaxies could hold the key to the birth of the cosmos. Why are these behemoths so hard to find? | I was about 10 years old when I saw the Milky Way for the first time. On holiday in the countryside, blissfully far away from the polluting airglow of city lights, the night sky was like nothing I’d ever seen before. There were more stars, of course, but there was also something wholly new: a vast silvery band of light... | Matthew Bothwell | https://aeon.co//essays/on-the-hunt-for-the-universes-biggest-galaxies-far-far-away | |
Animals and humans | The story of American beef is like the story of the nation as a whole: a mashup of history and myth, bloody and contested | In the film Red River (1948), all John Wayne wants to do is run a cattle ranch. But this is Hollywood and this is John Wayne, so there’s a lot more to the story. Wayne’s character, Thomas Dunson, embodies the old-time cowboy ideal of building a small herd of cattle into a thriving Texan ranch. It is the late 1860s, and... | Joshua Specht | https://aeon.co//essays/the-story-of-american-beef-mythical-bloody-and-contested | |
Knowledge | Far from being a touchstone of the truth, knowledge is a stone-age concept that harms our dealings with the modern world | I’m against knowledge. Don’t get me wrong: I’m as keen on the facts as the next person. I’m no friend of fake news. I want truth rather than falsity. It is specifically knowledge I’m against, not true belief. Knowledge asks more of us than true belief, and it isn’t worth it. In reality, the concept of knowledge is a ha... | David Papineau | https://aeon.co//essays/knowledge-is-a-stone-age-concept-were-better-off-without-it | |
Cognition and intelligence | Feminists never bought the idea of the computational mind set free from its body. Cognitive science is finally catching up | We are shackled to the pangs and shocks of life, wrote Virginia Woolf in The Waves (1931), ‘as bodies to wild horses’. Or are we? Serge Faguet, a Russian-born tech entrepreneur and self-declared ‘extreme biohacker’, believes otherwise. He wants to tame the bucking steed of his own biochemistry via an elixir of drugs, i... | Sally Davies | https://aeon.co//essays/feminists-never-bought-the-idea-of-a-mind-set-free-from-its-body | |
Nations and empires | For centuries, Europeans in Asia were guests, trading partners and subordinates. Only much later did Empire seem imaginable | Before the era of modern imperialism, when Europe dominated large parts of the world by deploying the newly acquired powers of industrialisation and nation-building, Europe had already established the seeds of its empire across the world. For a long time, the early modern rise of European colonial empires in Asia has b... | Chris Nierstrasz | https://aeon.co//essays/europeans-came-to-asia-not-as-conquerors-but-as-customers | |
Medicine | You might think they are disgusting. But our war against intestinal worms has damaged our immune systems and mental health | Did you ever wonder why one in six children has a mental health disorder? One in every six seems to be a few too many, I would think. Did you ever wonder why 20 per cent of women, in the United States at least, have been diagnosed with depression after menopause, and why ‘chronic fatigue syndrome’ has mysteriously emer... | William Parker | https://aeon.co//essays/gut-worms-were-once-a-cause-of-disease-now-they-are-a-cure | |
Global history | Cultural heritage is an ideal imposed from above. It’s time to listen to what communities value about their own histories | Mosul’s old city lies in ruins. A major section of the third largest city in Iraq has been destroyed by war. Two years after the Iraqi government and the United States-led coalition recaptured it from ISIS, the city is still noticeably scarred. Many residents have fled, or are detained in camps elsewhere in the country... | Michael Press | https://aeon.co//essays/why-cultural-heritage-benefits-the-rich-and-powerful-above-all | |
History of science | A century ago, a team of scientists chased the arc of starlight across a total eclipse to prove Einstein right on relativity | Usually, when scientists test a theory, they get everything nicely under control. But in 1919, as the First World War was drawing down, the British astronomer and physicist Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington did not have that luxury. He was going to test Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity at a solar eclipse thousands of ... | Matthew Stanley | https://aeon.co//essays/einstein-v-newton-the-final-battle-during-a-total-eclipse | |
Animals and humans | Commonsense tells us that both dogs and cats experience jealousy. Are we being anthropomorphic or can we know for sure? | My friend Laurette has two cats, Zhanna and Pixie. When Laurette pets Zhanna, Pixie interferes by attacking Zhanna. By analogy to humans, it is natural to interpret Pixie’s behaviour as jealousy, but perhaps Pixie is just attempting to assert dominance or establish territoriality. There have been no experimental studie... | Paul Thagard | https://aeon.co//essays/do-dogs-and-cats-actually-get-jealous-or-are-we-just-projecting | |
Mental health | Evolved human capacities for vigilance and worry are both exacerbated and rewarded by the intense pressure of modern life | It all began with a few drops of blood. Or, more precisely, a description of blood on the page. I was reading Lois Lowry’s childhood classic A Summer to Die (1977), about a girl who dies of leukaemia. The first sign that something’s wrong with Molly is a bloody nose that can’t be stopped. Whenever I got a bloody nose a... | Elizabeth Svoboda | https://aeon.co//essays/how-modern-life-exacerbates-and-rewards-human-vigilance-and-worry | |
History | Muslims came to America more than a century before Protestants, and in great numbers. How was their history forgotten? | The first words to pass between Europeans and Americans (one-sided and confusing as they must have been) were in the sacred language of Islam. Christopher Columbus had hoped to sail to Asia and had prepared to communicate at its great courts in one of the major languages of Eurasian commerce. So when Columbus’s interpr... | Sam Haselby | https://aeon.co//essays/muslims-lived-in-america-before-protestantism-even-existed | |
Thinkers and theories | She took things too seriously. She was difficult and unyielding. That’s why Susan Sontag’s work matters so much even now | The novelist Elias Canetti liked to say: ‘I try to imagine someone saying to Shakespeare: “Relax!”’ – and Susan Sontag liked to cite him saying it. I, in turn, like to cite Sontag citing him, because I like to place myself in this lineage of people who work too hard and take things too seriously. When I first read Agai... | Lauren Elkin | https://aeon.co//essays/susan-sontag-was-a-monster-of-the-very-best-kind | |
Earth science and climate | It ignited life on Earth, propelled evolution, and now signals climate change. Yet what sparks lightning remains a mystery | Lightning flashes through the sky millions of times a day, and humans have witnessed the spectacle repeatedly for tens of thousands of years. It was probably the spark for organic life, an idea tested in the lab back in 1952 when the chemist Harold Urey and his graduate student Stanley Miller exposed a simulation of th... | Sidney Perkowitz | https://aeon.co//essays/are-we-any-closer-to-learning-what-sparks-lightning | |
Neuroscience | Neurofeedback can put thoughts in your head and help you conquer phobias – even when you’re unaware of what it’s doing | Picture yourself in a lab, expecting to start a new kind of clinical treatment for anxiety. You’re nervous, your mind filled with thoughts of syringes and little white pills. Sterile walls line the hallways as you tiptoe into a room marked ‘Neurology’. But when you enter, all you see is a huge, donut-shaped tube. A dis... | Sara Kimmich | https://aeon.co//essays/neurofeedback-can-zap-your-fears-without-you-even-knowing | |
History of science | The great split between science and philosophy must be repaired. Only then can we answer the urgent, fundamental problems | There are decisive grounds for holding that we need to bring about a revolution in philosophy, a revolution in science, and then put the two together again to create a modern version of natural philosophy. Once upon a time, it was not just that philosophy was a part of science; rather, science was a branch of philosoph... | Nicholas Maxwell | https://aeon.co//essays/bring-back-science-and-philosophy-as-natural-philosophy | |
Family life | New parents face intense moral pressure from every quarter to breastfeed their babies. But sometimes bottle is better | I tend to avoid pictures of my daughter as a newborn. At the time, I was trying to breastfeed, but she wasn’t gaining weight. I remember flicking her with cold water to keep her awake to try to nurse, the twice-daily check-ins with the lactation consultant, the worry inscribed in the paediatrician’s face, the agony ove... | Laura Frances Callahan | https://aeon.co//essays/why-breastfeeding-is-not-always-best-for-mother-or-baby | |
Animals and humans | Farmed animals have personalities, smarts, even a sense of agency. Why then do we saddle them with lives of utter despair? | We’ve all heard them and used them – the common references to farmed animals that appeal to the worst part of human nature: ‘pearls before swine’, ‘what a pig’, ‘like lambs to the slaughter’, ‘bird brain’. These phrases represent our species’ view of farmed animals as not particularly bright, uncaring about their treat... | Lori Marino | https://aeon.co//essays/face-it-a-farmed-animal-is-someone-not-something | |
History of ideas | Once local and irregular, time-keeping became universal and linear in 311 BCE. History would never be the same again | What year is it? It’s 2019, obviously. An easy question. Last year was 2018. Next year will be 2020. We are confident that a century ago it was 1919, and in 1,000 years it will be 3019, if there is anyone left to name it. All of us are fluent with these years; we, and most of the world, use them without thinking. They ... | Paul J Kosmin | https://aeon.co//essays/when-time-became-regular-and-universal-it-changed-history | |
Thinkers and theories | Women loved Bergson’s philosophy of creativity, change and freedom, but their enthusiasm fuelled a backlash against him | In the early decades of the 20th century, the French philosopher Henri Bergson was an international celebrity. His fame had skyrocketed with the publication of his fourth book, Creative Evolution (1907). A philosophical interpretation of biological evolution, it rapidly became a worldwide bestseller. Suddenly, everyone... | Emily Herring | https://aeon.co//essays/henri-bergson-the-philosopher-damned-for-his-female-fans | |
Mood and emotion | Practising the Greek virtues of wisdom and courage is one thing. But being cheerful the American way borders on psychosis | I once ended up at a Boy Scout ceremony in the northeast United States, where I inhaled the American spirit unfiltered. The boys’ uniforms had Stars-and-Stripes patches sewn on next to their badges. We recited the Pledge of Allegiance in front of an oversize US flag, and we prayed to America’s vague God, giving thanks ... | Mariana Alessandri | https://aeon.co//essays/cheerfulness-cannot-be-compulsory-whatever-the-t-shirts-say | |
Design and fashion | We can analyse how fashion works by breaking it down into networks of style elements. What role, then, for human creativity? | Some cultural products live on and others die out. We all know this. But why do some works of creativity thrive and make history, while others disappear as soon as they have been released? What makes an idea, a poem, a song, a fashion item popular? There are so many possible explanations that it amounts to a mystery. M... | Frédéric Godart & Charles Galunic | https://aeon.co//essays/networks-of-elements-drive-human-creativity-do-they-also-stifle-it | |
Social psychology | The brain makes no distinction between a broken bone and an aching heart. That’s why social exclusion needs a health warning | The psychologist Naomi Eisenberger describes herself as a mutt of a scientist. Never quite fitting the mould of the fields she studied – psychobiology, health psychology, neuroscience – she took an unusual early interest in what you might call the emotional life of the brain. As a doctoral student at the University of ... | Elitsa Dermendzhiyska | https://aeon.co//essays/health-warning-social-rejection-doesnt-only-hurt-it-kills | |
Thinkers and theories | As for most ancient philosophers, Lucretius saw no boundary between his scientific interests and his ethical claims | By all accounts, Gaius Memmius was not a very nice man. After being accused of electoral fraud in Rome, he retired to Athens in about 54 BCE, where he wrote erotic poems. On arrival, he bought a plot of land on which he planned to build a house. According to Cicero, the land contained the ruins of the school founded by... | James Hannam | https://aeon.co//essays/lucretius-the-flat-earth-and-the-malaise-of-modern-science | |
Death | When a person goes missing, in war or in ordinary life, their story is cut off mid-sentence. A death can be easier to bear | ‘Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are to see anything.’ Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift (1975)As the Apache attack helicopter took off, with Captain Dave Rigg strapped to it, he realised that, in the four months he’d been in Afghanistan with the British Army, he had not yet fired his weapon. To test tha... | Andy Owen | https://aeon.co//essays/a-missing-person-is-like-a-story-without-an-ending | |
Physics | The human eye is a surprisingly good photon detector. What can it spy of the line between the quantum and classical worlds? | I spent a lot of time in the dark in graduate school. Not just because I was learning the field of quantum optics – where we usually deal with one particle of light or photon at a time – but because my research used my own eyes as a measurement tool. I was studying how humans perceive the smallest amounts of light, and... | Rebecca Holmes | https://aeon.co//essays/an-eye-on-experiments-that-make-quantum-mechanics-visible | |
Social psychology | In a world of difference we can – and should – work harder to cultivate subtle, perceptive empathy towards all human beings | Empathy, the sharing of feelings with another person and consequently caring about them, is typically a virtue in our society. ‘I hear you’ and ‘I feel your pain’ are said with a sense of compassion and concern for the welfare of others. We embrace the ‘Golden Rule’ to treat others as we would want to be treated. And w... | Elizabeth Segal | https://aeon.co//essays/a-sophisticates-primer-on-empathy-and-its-limits | |
Philosophy of mind | Don’t just do it, think about it too: how Gilbert Ryle’s philosophy of mind can help athletes teach themselves to improve | Yuki Kawauchi is a remarkable athlete. The winner of the 2018 Boston marathon – known in Japan as the ‘citizen runner’ – worked full-time at a school until April this year, when he finally went professional. Despite these commitments, Kawauchi runs 125km (nearly 78 miles) a week, and has kept a prodigious racing calend... | Josh Habgood-Coote | https://aeon.co//essays/dont-just-do-it-think-it-too-on-learning-with-gilbert-ryle | |
Physics | Science today is an intricate, collaborative, global enterprise. Nobel prizes for individual scientists are an anachronism | Imagine the outcry if, at the 2016 Summer Olympics, the legendary United States swim team – Michael Phelps, Ryan Lochte, Conor Dwyer and Townley Haas – still obliterated the competition, coming first in the men’s 4 x 200m freestyle relay, but only Haas, Lochte and Dwyer received medals, with nothing, not even a silve... | Brian Keating | https://aeon.co//essays/nobel-prizes-for-individual-scientists-are-an-anachronism | |
Cognition and intelligence | Our thinking devices – imitation, mind-reading, language and others – are neither hard-wired nor designed by genetic evolution | Bookshops are wonderful places – and not all the good stuff is in books. A few months ago, I spotted a man standing in the philosophy section of a local bookshop with his daughter, aged three or four. Dad was nose-deep in a tome, and his daughter was taking care of herself. But rather than wreaking havoc with the genre... | Cecilia Heyes | https://aeon.co//essays/how-culture-works-with-evolution-to-produce-human-cognition | |
Global history | In the night schools of Bombay, factory workers dreamed that literacy and learning would raise them to respectability | Do nights have a history to tell? How would the history of the working-class nights look? This question drove me to research the lives of the 19th-century labouring poor in colonial India. Following the French philosopher Jacques Rancière’s Proletarian Nights: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France (1981), I w... | Arun Kumar | https://aeon.co//essays/night-school-and-the-dreams-of-bombays-factory-workers | |
Physics | Humans love laws and seek predictability. But like our Universe, which thrives on entropy, we need disorder to flourish | The Buddhist monks from Namgyal monastery in India engage in a ritual that involves the creation of intricate patterns of coloured sand, known as mandalas. As large as three metres across, each mandala requires a couple of weeks of painstaking work, in which several monks in orange robes bend over a flat surface and sc... | Alan Lightman | https://aeon.co//essays/the-music-of-all-time-is-a-duet-between-order-and-disorder | |
Philosophy of mind | We’re certainly on to something when we say the brain is a computer – even if we don’t yet know what exactly we’re on to | ‘The brain is a computer’ – this claim is as central to our scientific understanding of the mind as it is baffling to anyone who hears it. We are either told that this claim is just a metaphor or that it is in fact a precise, well-understood hypothesis. But it’s neither. We have clear reasons to think that it’s literal... | Kevin Lande | https://aeon.co//essays/your-brain-probably-is-a-computer-whatever-that-means | |
Gender and identity | There is more that unites than divides analytic and continental feminist philosophies – not least efforts to define ‘woman’ | Although academic philosophy divides itself into continental and analytic strands, it is not entirely clear how this division is meant to work. For one thing, it pits a continent against a method, which, as the late English philosopher Bernard Williams once pointed out, is like comparing a car made in Japan with a car ... | Georgia Warnke | https://aeon.co//essays/do-analytic-and-continental-philosophy-agree-what-woman-is | |
History | People in the Middle Ages took great care over cleanliness – except the clergy, who accepted filth as a sign of devotion | In the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), two minor characters spot King Arthur. They know who he is because, as one of them points out: ‘He must be a king … he hasn’t got shit all over him like the rest of us.’ The scene encapsulates an enduring belief about the Middle Ages: medieval people were dirty. Some ... | Katherine Harvey | https://aeon.co//essays/medieval-people-were-surprisingly-clean-apart-from-the-clergy | |
Mental health | Even with loving parents and caring therapists, a child whose diagnosis came too late can lose the fight | Please note: this essay deals explicitly with suicide and may be distressing to some readers.I stood at Anna’s bedside, marvelling over her porcelain complexion, thick blonde hair, and eyelashes so long they’d be the envy of a Maybelline model. The bleached white sheet tucked under her chin covered all but her left han... | Deanna Csomo McCool | https://aeon.co//essays/when-a-childs-mental-health-diagnosis-comes-too-late-to-help | |
Political philosophy | More than false choices and options, the highest freedom lies in being true to oneself and defying the expectations of others | Are human beings free? Are we sources of at least some of our behaviour, not merely scenes in which the laws of nature unfold over time? And is our freedom, however we define it, truly different from anything that our nonhuman cousins enjoy? These worries haunt philosophers. In Beyond Good and Evil (1886), Friedrich Ni... | Mariam Thalos | https://aeon.co//essays/more-than-having-options-freedom-is-being-true-to-yourself | |
Nations and empires | In 20th-century Turkey, modernisers turned to eugenics and claims of an ancient Asian past to argue that Turks were white | In the context of the United States, white supremacy resonates with a long history and memories of slavery and Jim Crow, and the current resurgence of racism. In other parts of the world, the idea of whiteness stood in the middle of very different debates. In the late-19th and early 20th centuries, modernisers from Ira... | Murat Ergin | https://aeon.co//essays/the-fantastic-science-of-turkeys-whiteness-campaign | |
Design and fashion | At every turn, the design of our environments either creates barriers or opens doors. Let’s design a more humane world | My mother was someone who made do in a world that didn’t fully account for her body. Born with bilateral clubfoot in 1940, she was not expected to walk. One of her earliest memories was of being carried by her father on to the bus, her plaster leg casts heavy from soaking in the bathtub the night before so that the doc... | Anna Leahy | https://aeon.co//essays/an-environment-designed-to-suit-every-body-is-better-for-all | |
Psychiatry and psychotherapy | Acceptance and commitment therapy teaches us how to live a values-driven life even in the face of dark emotions and trauma | Before she even knew what was happening, he was already on her. He punched her in the face, smashed her head against the wall, and dragged her through the corridor by her hair. The pain was searing; the fear, overwhelming. When help finally arrived, after what seemed like an eternity, the damage had already been done. ... | Joseph Trunzo | https://aeon.co//essays/how-to-live-a-values-driven-life-in-the-face-of-dark-emotions | |
Social psychology | It’s a truism of social psychology that witnesses are less likely to intervene if other onlookers are present. Not so | A few years ago, I was assaulted on a busy street in London by a man who came up behind me. Some details of the assault are hazy, others pin-sharp. I recall exactly what my attacker did, and that the assault was witnessed by rush-hour drivers sitting at a red light. If there were pedestrians nearby, I do not remember t... | Melanie McGrath | https://aeon.co//essays/it-looks-like-human-beings-might-be-good-samaritans-after-all | |
History | The spectre of a Nazi Britain, successfully invaded in 1940, continues to haunt the British political imagination | For more than half a century, it seemed that fascism in general and Nazism in particular had suffered their inexorable defeat and permanent annihilation in the Second World War. But with Right-wing authoritarian and ethnic nationalist movements on the rise across the world, the irrevocability of Nazism’s eradication no... | Catherine Gallagher | https://aeon.co//essays/the-many-counterfactual-histories-of-nazi-britain |
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